Want a ticket for England v Ecuador today?. To judge from the prices a small army of touts in Stuttgart were charging yesterday, the going rate for desperate England fans is anything from €950 to €1,300 (£650-£890). 'I've got 10 Category 1 tickets left, but they're €1,300 each,' said Sean, an American tout. 'It's England, so demand is huge. It doesn't matter where the tickets have come from, the England fans want to buy them..'

The highly organised exploitation of England fans in evidence in Stuttgart this weekend is the latest example of the widespread ticket-touting at this World Cup. Many have tickets been sold by Germans offloading at huge mark-ups seats they had obtained through Fifa's internet ballot, but extensive inquiries by Observer Sport have revealed numerous alarming breaches of Fifa's supposedly rigorous ticketing rules:

· Many of the tickets available on the black market were issued to the FAs in some of Fifa's 207 member countries worldwide, including Brazil, Japan and France. A significant number have come from ticket allocations reserved by the tournament's 15 sponsors, such as Adidas and McDonald's.

· Football officials and civil servants from Ghana, one of the World Cup's unexpected successes, were seen by Observer journalists selling tickets at well over their face value before their victories over Czech Republic and the United States.

· Some touts selling large numbers of tickets stamped with the name of a sponsor claim to be working with that company to offload seats for which they have no use.

All these are violations of the regulations that Fifa have drawn up in an attempt to prevent profiteering at the World Cup. 'Tickets originally bought by Fifa member associations and sponsors should not end up on the black market,' Fifa spokesman Andreas Herren said yesterday. 'If you send us details of tickets sold in this way, we will investigate. While national associations are allowed to sell tickets to other people, the person buying must sign an agreement agreeing to the terms and conditions of sale, which say that a service fee can be charged but that you must not put up the price.'

Any Fifa inquiry could start by looking into what was happening last weekend at the Hilton Hotel in Cologne, where Michael Essien and the rest of his Ghana team-mates were staying before their match against the Czech Republic. In the hours before kick-off, two men who were with the Ghana FA party were selling tickets stamped with the Ghanaian FA's name to fans, including Czechs and English, for €250 each. With the original price of the tickets ranging from €35 to €100, they were making a killing.

On Thursday, outside the Frankenstadion in Nuremberg where Ghana recorded the victory over the US that gave them a dream match against Brazil, an Observer journalist talked to members of a delegation from the Ghanaian government who were in Germany to study the organisation of the World Cup to help them to prepare for hosting the African Nations Cup in 2008.

Moments later, the police moved in to question one of their colleagues, who was selling tickets, and then took him away. That did not deter the group of English and Ghanaian touts gathered nearby, who continued selling, especially to ticketless Americans eager to watch the match.

England fans have been prominent among those who have paid exorbitant prices to touts because they failed to get tickets through official channels. Many fans who did that for England's Group B opener against Paraguay, paying up to €800 each, bought tickets marked 'Paraguay football federation' and sitting in what should have been a 3,300-strong Paraguay section. The English FA privately believe that up to half that allocation had been sold to England fans through touts, although a Fifa inquiry into where the Paraguayan FA's tickets had gone cleared them of any wrongdoing.

Five days later, a friend of Gary Kitching, a veteran traveller to England matches abroad from Rotherham, got into the England-Trinidad & Tobago game by paying a tout €250 for a €60 seat issued originally to the Japanese FA.

Observer Sport has come across many examples of that at other matches, with English people picking up tickets originally issued by Fifa, under strict conditions of sale, to the FAs of Brazil, France, Japan and Ivory Coast. Last week, Fifa executive committee member Ismail Bhamjee was sent home from the World Cup in disgrace after offering to sell 12 England fans €100 tickets for the Trinidad & Tobago game at three times their face value.

Many tickets issued to the World Cup's sponsors have been sold the same way. Last Sunday, education lecturer Jes Baines and theatre technician Adam Baines, both from Kent, bought two €60 seats together at the France-South Korea match in Leipzig for €150 each, both bearing Yahoo's name.

One Observer reader, who does not want to be identified, paid well over the odds for a seat at the Italy-Ghana match that came from the 'Fifa - adidas' allocation and one for Portugal-Angola that had originally been allocated to 'Fifa - McDonald's'.

'Outside Cologne cathedral before the Portugal-Angola game an American tout had boxes of tickets from Hyundai [a sponsor]. He told me he was selling their surplus tickets and splitting the money with them. He said he could get me tickets for any game I wanted, including the final.

'It was the same in Hanover before Italy-Ghana. The two guys who sold me my ticket said they were on the same deal with adidas. Again, all games were available on a sliding scale of prices, depending on the demand. All were clearly marked with Fifa and the sponsors' names. This is a scandal.'

Fifa and the German 2006 organising committee insist that the ticketing system is working as well as can be expected. 'We've done all we can. You can never completely rule out a black market,' said World Cup spokesman Gerd Graus, while Fifa have said that there will be a better distribution system in South Africa in 2010.

The boast is that ticket sales are better than expected, that stadiums are 99 per cent full and that the average attendance is 51,500, the highest since the 1994 World Cup in the US, where the grounds were bigger. Meanwhile, in the 12 host cities, ticket racketeering is happening on a huge scale with fans, as ever, its victims.